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Kwesi Aidoo (Facebook photo)
We normally don't think of college students as homeless.
But as Bill Laitner of the Detroit Free Press reports, some local students are either homeless or “precariously housed” — defined as bouncing from one bed to another.
One of those people, Kwesi Aidoo, 40, received his associate degree in business Saturday from the downtown Detroit campus of Wayne County Community College, the Freep reports.
Laitner writes:
Aidoo has lived since May 15 for free at Mariners Inn in Detroit’s Cass Corridor. It’s a men's homeless shelter for addiction treatment where Aidoo stayed in 2007-08, battling addictions to alcohol and drugs, he said. After spending much of this year in a friend’s foreclosed house — with no heat or water — Aidoo, 40, found his way back to the shelter, he said last week.
“It took me eight years to get this degree, but now I’m feeling real good,” Aidoo said, seated in the shelter’s one-room library, where he did much of his homework and online coursework.
He's not alone when it comes to being homeless.
Wayne State University researchers conducted a study. They posted queries on campus websites, looking for homeless students, the Freep reports. They offered to pay $20 or give an extra college credit for each one -to two-hour interview. They found 25 students who’d been truly homeless, and 25 others who were "precariously housed," at some time in the last year, Laitner writes.
Homeless WSU undergrads are "mostly bouncing among friends or family members, but you do get some cases of sleeping in the library or the community center for a week,” said Corissa Carlson, a WSU graduate psychology student, who was the author of the study designed by Paul Toro, a WSU professor of psychology.
